People-watching dogs know who to ask for treats

Next time you bicker with your buddies over who gets the last biscuit, look out for eavesdropping dogs: they may be keeping tabs on your generosity towards others.

That's the conclusion of Sarah Marshall-Pescini, who has just put canine cleverness through the latest round of tests at the University of Milan's Canis sapiens lab in Italy. Her results suggest that dogs are remarkably good at interpreting social interactions in a different species - ours.

But it is quite another thing to draw conclusions about people's characters
by merely observing how they treat each other. Other than in humans,
this kind of talent has been observed rarely in the animal kingdom: chimps have the skill and so, apparently, do some large fish that recruit the help of only the most cooperative cleaner fish.

To show how good dogs are at studying humans, Marshall-Pescini and her
colleagues had them observe how readily two actors shared small cereal
and sausage bits with another person who came to beg them for some
morsels. After the beggar had either been shooed away with a harsh
gesture and a firm "No!" or received a tasty tidbit along with some
words of kindness, the dogs were given the choice of approaching one or the
other actor.

In two-thirds of all trials the dogs went straight for the generous
person. This wasn't merely a preference for a friendlier voice: if the "beggar" wasn't present and the dogs couldn't work out who was most
generous, they were no more likely to approach a kind-voiced actor than a harsh-voiced one.

Nevertheless it seemed to be the tone of voice that the dogs used to
make their judgement, because when the actors used only gestures,
the dogs had much more trouble picking out the generous guy. "We were
surprised that the voice had more impact than the gestures," says
Marshall-Pescini, arguing that much work so far has pointed to dogs
being more talented observers than listeners.

The researchers reckon that dogs' social psychology skills have
developed as a special asset during the domestication process rather
than being merely a carry-over of similar eavesdropping tendencies
within a pack. "We haven't yet noticed a similar preference for generous
individuals in interactions between free-ranging dogs in Rome," says
Marshall-Pescini.

The the results of this study don't match the conclusions drawn by the researchers; they're looking at dogs from a human perspective.

I go into more detail in my recent blog article at PsychologyToday.com.

http://ow.ly/4BmU2

Also, we do NOT know that dogs "sulk" when treated unfairly. The study on "inequity aversion" in dogs was done by Fredericke Range, and she based it on a study done on monkeys by Frans de Waal. De Waal's study was questioned/debunked by Tomasello and Call, who performed the same basic procedure with chimps and found that there is a simpler explanation other than that they elt they were being treated unfairly.

Even the idea of inequity aversion itself, which comes from a paper (not a study) done by two experimental economists, was flawed. They cherry-picked the results from other studies that fit their theory. Inequity aversion may very well be a real phenomenon in human interactions, but since it hasn't been proven in chimps or monkeys, and since Fredericke Range's study was very badly designed, and has never been replicated, it's very unlikely that it exists in dogs.

Here's a more detailed explanation about how and why dogs don't sulk when they're treated unfairly.